This week, Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge has the subject of ‘Tongues and Tails’. This is something I would definitely think twice about googling while in mixed company.

Anyway….in the game reserve on Sir Bani Yas island in Abu Dhabi it certainly used to be possible to be driven through the giraffe compound and feed the locals through the open window of your SUV, as illustrated here. You can just about see the giraffe’s tongue, which in real life is actually blue.

WordPress wants to see some images of sunrises and/or sunsets for their latest Weekly Photo Challenge.

I don’t have many sunrises, probably because that would involve getting up early. However, in the past I have posted a few sunsets (all the decent ones, it seems) under various threads, so here is a little compendium of a few of the better examples, beginning with the same view that I put up in response to last week’s ‘Favourite Place’ challenge:

More exotically, this was taken on a sunset cruise off Muscat, in Oman:

and this one in the game reserve on Sir Bani Yas Island in Abu Dhabi – the giraffe enclosure, to be exact:

This, though, is probably the most spectacular sunset I’ve ever captured – just outside Beverley, in East Yorkshire:

Still away from base, so still reliant on the back catalogue to respond to Frank’s latest theme, of ‘Sky’.

This was originally posted as the ‘after’ image of a largely unregarded post-processing challenge a couple of years ago.

The photograph was taken at sunset in the giraffe compound on the Sir Bani Yas game reserve in Abu Dhabi. Because the island is largely desert and this was well inland, the sky was not in the usual blue to purple part of the spectrum.

When I saw that Frank had set us the theme of ‘Golden’ for this week’s Tuesday Photo Challenge, I knew exactly where to look in my library.

Here are two images captured in the lobby of the Sir Bani Yas Hotel, on the eponymous nature reserve in Abu Dhabi. The first is a crescent of stone mounted against a golden background:

This second image is one of my personal favourites, and one I’ve used in a previous post. Looking directly upwards, it shows the huge lanterns suspended from the golden atrium. Never knowingly understated.

I have been very fortunate to travel widely – and not always on business – but the ten years we spent living an working in Abu Dhabi were particularly memorable: and, of course, completely different in almost every way to what we were used to.

On the nature reserve of Sir Bani Yas Island, in the Arabian Gulf, we went for a game drive at sunset, where I found this lone oryx, which seems to have some wanderlust of its own. There really was a yellow cast to the sky as the sun was going down.